You can’t read books for very long without someone saying “have you read anything by Connie Willis?” If you read Sci Fi and Fantasy it’s a good bet that someone is going to recommend her work very strongly, with that whole “you HAVE to read Connie Willis” desperate pleading people do when they’ve got a favourite book or author they want to share.
She’s won more awards than that kid you went to high school with who always went to the podium 50 times on presentation day. Her bio says she’s won more Nebula awards than any other living author. People love her.
Sadly, after 10 years of flirting with her stuff I have decided I’m not one of those people. Really, very much not.
You see the title on this post? Is that stray apostrophe, stranded sadly between the E and the S making you want to peel the film off your eyeballs? That feeling, that right there, that’s what I get when I read Connie Willis.
Her schtick is that she ostensibly writes about Time Travel, and I’m convinced that’s what leads people to consider her a Sci Fi author and give her all those fancy prizes. But I’ll tell you a secret. What she actually writes is really amazingly detailed anthropological fiction. By sending an observer from the 2050s to a dramatic time in the past, she is able to talk about day-to-day life in that era as someone from our era would experience it. And those stories are actually really good, if you are into the People Are A Zoo style of story-telling, as I am.
What isn’t good is the gorram time travel nonsense. And that is why I am here writing a Readero Furiouso blog entry three days after stepping out of The Doomsday Book and returning the Oxford Time Travel series to the library with only skim marks from my angry eyeballs.
Since her real story is about how a person from the now would deal with the problems of the then, she has to contrive a system of time travel where the rules are never clearly stated. It just works and there are rules to how it works which are known to the idiots who run the system. But we never know them. We just see endless pages upon pages of Poor Kivrin Stuck In The Past and the idiots who run the time travel department at Oxford not able to make a long distance call.
Yes. That’s right. In this marvelous future where the common cold is vanquished, fossil fuels are supplanted by cleaner energy sources (also never explained) and there is a system of time travel in place which is so common that it is bureaucratised…in this world there ARE NO CELL PHONES. A full twenty percent of The Doomsday Book is one man trying to place phone calls to various people he needs to rescue Poor Kivrin Stuck In The Past. Really. “The line was still engaged.”
I promise you the line was engaged far more than I was.
I generally have issues with time travel as a story-telling device because when used poorly it allows an author to be lazy about plotting and character development. There are a few writers who use it well, but most of the time it is like a cheese souffle in that it is best left to the people who know how to work within the delicate framework it requires.
What I would really love to read is a Connie Willis book about the past without all the nonsense about idiot time travelers. Because these people who are chosen to go back to World War II or the Black Plague or Victorian England suffer from a deficit of common sense that is painful to behold.
Sort of like that apostrophe up there.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
Then there is [ahem] the question of how accurate her depictions of the past are.
Eh. Yeah. That was the other thing. Because she really doesn’t KNOW. Granted, neither does anyone else, for the most part. Not 100% for sure. Although there are people with a lot of years of study under their belts who have a fairly good idea. When she runs up against that her standard response is “all the historians believe X, but I’m here in the past looking at it and THEY’RE WRONG!”
It’s nice how she can both claim super-accuracy AND authorial license like that.
I feel like she gets those writer awards because she cheats. if she were honest about writing historical fiction she wouldn’t stand for the prizes, because she’s not head and shoulders above folks in those categories. But by putting that Time Travel nonsense in there and saying “hey! It’s SciFi!” she impresses the prize-giving panels by being pseudo-intellectual. They’d rather see their prize on ponderous tome about War What Is It Good For than something fun like robots and space hookers.
At least that’s how I see it.
Unless I am confusing her with someone else, I have read some non-time-travel stuff of hers that I thought was OK. But that was 20 years ago; Doomsday Book was so awful that I stopped reading her altogether, so I can’t comment on anything she’s written since then. Sadly, I run into some people who think they know something about the plague in England because they have read that book. Ugh.
Uh, yeah, I know what you mean. For time travel to be considered sci-fi, it can’t just be a convenient way to write a historical fiction w/ characters from the present. There’s a lot of that going around–the whole “poof” suddenly I found myself in Mr. Darcy’s bedroom (which is, admittedly, not ancient, but I’ve read that kind of book, too).
But now you’re making me a little nervous because I have time travel in my book w/ no explanation given for it at all. It’s not sci-fi, though. It’s more “supernatural”.
Don’t be nervous. I don’t hate all time travel outright. It’s not like green beans or cod–something I just plain refuse on principle. A lot of my favourite stories involve time travel elements: Harry Potter & POA; a Wrinkle In Time.
I like it when it is smart. I don’t like it for when it’s an excuse to back out of a storyline that isn’t working (Fringe), to reboot a franchise (Star Trek), to make googlyeyed fanfic (Outlander).
The time travel in Willis’ oeuvre is not in itself annoying. It’s the stupidity of the people who use it. They make no backups of critical data, contingency plans, prearranged signals or meeting places. I’ve had family trips to the mall that were better organized.
Pardon the brevity and the typos. This was sent from my iPhone.
Oh dear. I like her an awful lot. And I liked the Doomsday book a lot.
I know I’ve just marked myself out as an uncultured swine, but I’ll dig the pit deeper by saying that I like how her time travel mechanics are murky. By the time of All Clear, she’s made it abundantly plain that the time travelers themselves have destabilized the system and that’s why people keep getting trapped in the past. The continued use of time travel is foreclosing further use of time travel.
And I read the lack of cell phones as something similar–they were part of an unsustainable system (using all those fossil fuels) that we couldn’t keep forever. Her “present day” future times always have a rough edge of privation and improvisation that’s almost, but not quite, post-apocalyptic. I dug it. But I am a big ole cheeseball too.
I should probably have sought you out on Friday when I was having my mini-meltdown. Then it wouldn’t have turned into a mega-meltdown that lasted all weekend.
Reading your defense of CW I can see the flip side of what bothered me and it makes sense. It really does.
For some reason I always read CW books when I’m really sick. I guess they seem like good “i’m stuck in bed” books. But when I’m sick I don’t process them well. Maybe now that I have your “pro” voice I should try to go back to OTT duolog when I’m well and see if that reevaluation helps. Generally you and I agree on books.
Weren’t you the one who recommended _to say nothing of the dog_? It’s been a long time since I read that, but I liked it at the time. I get what you’re saying about the slapdash time travel, but I still liked that book. I probably won’t go running out to get that one, though.
Willis is one of my favorite authors. Though I recognize that this is partly because I met her and she was really charming and wonderful, like your favorite elementary school teacher. And “Passage” was a life changing book for me because I read it at an impressionable age, while my grandmother was dying of cancer. I will continue to call her one of my favorite authors, even though I recognize that a lot of her works falls a little short in my estimation of “good.”
Like Jess says, a lot of the time travel comes together in the later books. Also “The Doomsday Book” was published in 1993, so I suspect when she was writing it that cell phones and even personal computers to some extent, weren’t prevalent enough (or part of her consciousness enough) for her to imagine a future full of them. And Kivrin is one of my least favorite of her characters in that universe. I went back and tried to read it again after “All Clear” and just bleh. If I read Kivrin being whiny and stupid while I was sick, I’d probably want to set the book on fire.